Author: William Hubbard

William Hubbard Jr. (b. 1947) is a retired architect and professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A graduate of the University of Virginia (1970) and MIT’s Master of Science in Architecture Studies program (1976), Hubbard is the author of Complicity and Conviction: Steps Toward an Architecture of Convention (1980), a response to Robert Venturi’s 1966 ode to modernist architecture; A Theory for Practice: Architecture in Three Discourses (1995), an argument for seeing buildings “as an instance of architectural order, as an embodiment of values about living, and as an instrument for bringing about these results”; and American Boundaries: The Nation, the States, and the Rectangular Survey (2008), an exploration of how US state borders were decided.

William Hubbard

War memorials and monuments such as those discussed in the preceding selections pay homage to the fallen not only by recognizing their valor but also by celebrating the cause for which they gave their lives. This is more easily done when the cause is popular. But how do we remember the dead in an unpopular war?